an opinionated sports blog

March 21, 2016

I honestly don’t know how we can continually be surprised by the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament any more, but somehow, every year there’s something new.

Yale somehow won its first game in history.

We had our first ever day that saw a 12, 13 and 14 seed win.

We saw a team blow a 12-point lead in the final 35 seconds of a game.

It wasn’t the first time that a top-5 tournament favourite has been knocked out in the first round, but that was the case when Middle Tennessee bounced Michigan State – a team that many thought were robbed of a No. 1 seed, look at how that turned out.

Within the span of five real-time minutes, we even saw a huge upset on a half-court buzzer-beater to see 11-seed University of Northern Illinois top Texas and then Cincinnati get sent packing after a player didn’t get a buzzer-beating dunk attempt off in time. That’s right: A buzzer-beating dunk attempt. It’s these types of mistakes that make the college game as unpredictable and fun to watch as ever.

The one thing that isn’t new is that your bracket is always going to have a whole lot of red lines on it already.

I mean, a realistic Final Four of Michigan State, California (if you didn’t catch that its leading scorer broke his hand in practice), Xavier/West Virginia/Kentucky in the East and Baylor (the only reach here), is already shot to pieces.